StarFall: Spellbinder #1: "Take This Job and Shove It"

[Andrew Perron]

On Dec 16, 8:35Â pm, William Strickland <indomitable.will... at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Dec 16, 2:50Â pm, Andrew Perron <pwer... at gmail.com> wrote:

> Wooo! A comment! I love comments!

This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. *walks off
into fog past cardboard cutout maintained by midgets*

> > This is neat, and an aspect of Medusa that we don't get to see much.
> > (Mind you, most female characters in Greek myths would have cause to
> > similarly rant, except for the ones who were manipulators *of* men.)
>
> And in some cases, those too.

True.  Medea was one, then the other.

> > This is awkwardly phrased. Â But then again, maybe it's supposed to be.
>
> It is and it isn't. Both Chel and I are still hitting our storytelling
> stride. She's new, I'm rusty. On the other hand, words tend to fail a lot when
> talking about insanity, and clinical language isn't Chel's style.

In this case, it was less the insanity and more the foreshadowing.
But point taken.

> Part of this is that there will be story elements that Chelsea has no
> way of knowing herself, or else would only know secondhand; for
> instance, Maddy watching television is not something she had direct knowledge
> of (although she could guess at it, since she knows Maddy). Even if
> she came into the knowledge later on and could relate it, she doesn't
> like telling other people's stories; it makes her feel awkward, like
> she was caught stealing. I, of course, have no such problems.

Yeah, but having her describe the situation from outside with a
personal viewpoint and then start talking about "a voice from on high"
and "the floating wizard" is off.  Methinks when she showed up, she
should've brought her first-person viewpoint with her.

> > Miiiiiigh-ty willpower! *hee hee hee*
>
> <Chelsea> There! See? Isn't it *great*?

Fear, villain, at the sting of my MI-T WILLPOWER!

> > Ahhhhh, so there's an origin before the origin. Â Neat!
>
> I decided to move the origin back and break it up into flashback
> fragments because doing it all at once, and all up front, would set almost the perfectly
> wrong tone for the rest of the story. In this story I'm going for, predominantly, a fun,
> kind of zany tone.

Hmmmm.  I wouldn't quite call it zany so far - though it's certainly
not dour and depressing, either.  More like the kind of humor you'd
get in a laid-back slice-of-life webcomic. (...many of which are
zany.  Okay, I'll just be blatant and say Questionable Content.)

> > Hm. Â So, wait, who comes from Realm Nine? Â A traditional mythic
> > pantheon, or something else?
>
> Something else. Certainly a mythic pantheon, but there's little about
> them that's traditional. You might even say their way of doing things
> is ...new.

Ooooh. Intriguing.

> > That last line doesn't seem to fit.
>
> Perhaps an explanation is needed, but I can handle that in the next
> issue. Which should be out before the new year anyway, so hey.
> The short version would be that this has to do with certain basic
> assumptions that creatures of magic, including the gods, demons,
> monsters and so on, have about their relationship to humanity.
> The most basic assumption being that they're in charge, and that
> they can and will break humanity if it gets too uppity.
> But they *like* humanity. Humanity is fun. So one of the Mystic
> Defender's jobs is to keep humanity from getting uppity.

I see whatcha mean.  Zeus's scene definitely implied a certain
attitude - and, naturally, that that attitude, in the present day, is
going to be upended sooner rather than later.

(Incidentally, for another perspective on a similar subject, you might
want to read ASH.  That setting involves a whole apocalypse caused by
stuff like this.)

> Maddy means well. However, she's gotten the same advice a few dozen
> times by now, and it hasn't gotten her to be cautious about things
> that might set her off, nor has it prompted her to consider finding a way to get
> at the underlying issues. She isn't a bad person, but she *is* being
> pampered. And everyone likes being pampered, right? Of course, considering that
> she's been treated as an abomination for three thousand years, maybe she deserves
> a little TLC.

That's fair.  A bit of tough love wouldn't be out of place, then,
assuming it really was meant to be helpful.

Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, back-n-forth!